Link Building
Link Building Through Blogging
by Bob Stone on Oct.01, 2009, under Link Building
It seems like pretty much everyone has a blog nowadays and everyone needs SEO promotion. It has become a unique medium and a culture all its own. If you are serious about developing a presence on the web, a blog seems like a forgone conclusion. Blogging can be great for a web-based business for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is link building.
The great thing about blogging is that it gives your site a personality. If you run a business on the web, it puts a “face” to that and gives customers something to relate to. Beyond that, it allows you to generate a sort of grass roots PR. A lot of the link building in the blogosphere is done through pure goodwill – pay it forward, if you will. If you blog about other sites in your industry and comment on their blogs, they are likely to return the favor. Commenting on other blogs in an intelligent and constructive fashion may also turn readers of that blog on to your site.
If you decide to use blogging to help your link building campaign, it’s vital that you don’t abuse it. You shouldn’t use it as an opportunity to spam other blogs with links back to you. That will have the opposite of the desired effect, making you look unprofessional and disreputable. In many cases, it might also get you banned from commenting on those blogs in the future. It’s also important to be patient – you need to spend some time generating a name for yourself and a reputation before you can expect a lot of links coming in from other bloggers.
Understanding PageRank for Link Building
by Bob Stone on Sep.23, 2009, under Link Building
When discussing link building, the term “PageRank” is almost guaranteed to come up. But what does PageRank really represent, and how important is it to link building? The specific term PageRank is actually specific only to the search engine Google. Other major search engines, like Yahoo! and MSN Search, do not use it. That said, all search engines have an internal metric that they use to determine how relevant and useful a certain page is. When some people say “PageRank,” they aren’t referring specifically to Google’s model, but rather a general sense of how important a site is.
What really drives PageRank and most of the algorithms that search engines use is not what is on your website, but what is on the sites that link back to yours. You could have designed the best site on the planet, but it wouldn’t have a PageRank until others started to notice it and reference it.
Fortunately, like their designers, such as website design company Delhi, the search engines are fairly smart. They don’t just accept any link. Otherwise, people could just create endless numbers of sites spamming links back to their main page. So each search engine uses its own complicated system to decide how trustworthy each link to a site is. The popularity of the linking site, the industry segment of the linking site compared to your site, and dozens of other factors are considered. No one who doesn’t work for the search engine developers knows the exact process, but there are some commonly agreed upon premises that can help you build an effective network of links.
The Link Building Process
by Bob Stone on Sep.16, 2009, under Link Building
Link building is an extremely powerful strategy for Internet advertising with one major disadvantage: it takes a ton of time to pursue. The benefits are too good to ignore, however, and if you want to run a successful business from the web, the excessive legwork that link building takes is unavoidable which is a good reason to hire an SEO company.
The first step in starting a link building campaign is to identify the sites with which you can share links with, or buy links from. This can be tricky, depending on what sort of website you are running. All your best options may be direct competitors. Once you’ve identified the potentials, you have to get in touch with them. Depending on the Webmaster of the site you want to deal with, it can take some time to hear back. You may want to take this time to research the other site and ensure that a link exchange with them will actually be beneficial to you.
Assuming you hear a positive response, your next step should be to work out the details. Talk to the people that run the other site and figure out exactly where your link will appear on their page, how long the link exchange will last, and so on. Once that’ s done, you may want to help the various search engines find these links. There are a few ways to do this, but the faster it happens, the faster you’ll see increased search engine traffic. That’s generally the last step, but going forward you should be sure to check back and ensure that your link partner is keeping their end of the deal. Of course, you can also just hire a SEO company India.
Link Building and Industry Relevance
by Bob Stone on Aug.25, 2009, under Link Building
Search engines have very specific criteria that determine how they rank websites when a user performs a search. As many people know, having more sites linking to you means that search engines will generally rank you higher. However, there are special rules that apply to this process. One of the rules, which all web promotion services companies know, has to do with a thing called industry relevance.
Search engines will give more value to links to your site if they come from a site that deals in a similar industry as you. For instance, if you run a site focused on computer hardware, then the best site to get a link from is another site dealing in hardware. Computer software sites or other electronics sites will also be a pretty good match and help boost your page’s rank. However, if you were to get a link from a site about gardening, for whatever reason, it would be of minimal benefit to you.
This process is called applied semantics. It is a technology that browses through each page, searching for keywords that indicate would industry the page is associated with. It’s not an exact science, but it is pretty accurate. It views links that cross from one industry sector an unrelated one as suspect, and thus ranks them lower. This is yet another reason you should take care in choosing how you build your link network. You don’t want to invest time and effort into a link partnership that won’t provide you any meaningful benefits.
What is Link Building?
by Bob Stone on Aug.21, 2009, under Link Building
One of the things that many beginners, but not a professional SEO company, overlook when promoting web sites is link popularity. The benefit of having other sites linking to yours is fairly obvious – increased traffic directed your way from those sites. However, building link popularity actually has a much more important function. Search engines pay very close to attention to how many sites are linking to yours, and how popular those sites are. Thus, in order to maximize your ranking on search engines, you have to dedicate some effort to building links.
The easiest way to build link strength is to make a deal with another website. The trouble with this is that you need links that fit with your sites niche, and most of the people looking to exchange links will be competitors. You may have to work hard to find sites that are within your niche but different enough that you’re not in direct competition. Another option is to purchase link space from more popular sites. They’re easier to find, but the disadvantage is that they cost straight out-of-pocket money. You can also outsource the process. Many companies will do the required legwork to help you build your link network, for a fee.
Regardless of the path that you decide to take, link building is too important to ignore. The boost in traffic that you’ll see after putting together a proper link network is significant. In the long run, you can save a lot of money on your internet advertising costs by aggressively pursuing a link building strategy.
Premises of Link Building
by Bob Stone on Jul.24, 2009, under Link Building
Effective search engine marketing through link building requires a good deal of finesse. There are a lot of subtle tactics that you can employ to help build link popularity and push your site higher in search engine rankings. Here are a few of them:
Use effective lists. People like lists that are made of punchy, to-the-point tips that are easily digestible. If you make a list that has good information and is easy to read, people will be more than happy to link to it.
Flawless writing. If people believe that your site is authoritative, they are that much more likely to link to it. If your text is riddled with errors in spelling and grammar, it looks unprofessional and unreliable.
Blog consistently. Write compelling blog content and update frequently. Link to other blogs and sites as much as you can – if your content is good they are likely to return to the favor. Commenting on other blogs can also drive some traffic your way and generate goodwill.
Never, ever spam. This includes posting in forums or on other blogs, or dealing with link-farm style directories. Spamming links to your site completely out of context is a definite way to hurt your relevance, and possibly have your site removed altogether.
Run contests. People love the opportunity for free stuff. If you’ve got a little extra cash to throw around, it can go a long way and generate a lot of links. If you think about how many big businesses run sweepstakes, you’ll realize how effective it can be.
Types of Links in Link Building
by Bob Stone on May.27, 2009, under Link Building
In link building and search engine optimization, there are basically two different types of links that you’ll commonly be dealing with. There is the reciprocal link, which is basically a trade – you link to someone else’s site, and they link back to you. Alternately, there’s the one-way link, in which you’re receiving a link without having to link back (although that’s not to say that there’s no trade involved!). Which type you are dealing with will vary from situation to situation, and as your site evolves you may lean toward more of one or the other.
Reciprocal links are one of the easier types of links to get, but they are by no means easy to manage. Even once you’ve tracked down a site that is amicable to trading links with you, there are a lot of other hoops to jump through. One of the biggest problems is that a lot of sites just don’t know effective strategies to build link popularity. You may have to go through a lot of back-and-forth to get the link on their site exactly the way you want it. Worse still, some people are unscrupulous and will find ways to ensure that you gain nothing from their links, while they still enjoy the benefits of yours.
One-way links are usually a more powerful tool, but they are also more difficult to get. Part of the problem with reciprocal links is that there’s little quality control. Bad sites can link to other bad sites and they’ll both grow in link popularity, which hurts the general user’s web surfing experience. Many one-way links are posted by people who genuinely enjoy or appreciate a site, so those links are considered more valuable.
Link Building Considerations
by Bob Stone on May.15, 2009, under Link Building
Link building consists of more than just getting links from random other pages. Links from certain sites are simply worth more than others, and some links are just plain worthless. There is a multitude of different factors that you have to consider when pursuing a link building strategy which SEO services India companies certainly know.
One of the primary things to check when choosing a link partner is their PageRank. To put it simply, a link from a site with a high PageRank is worth more than one from a low-ranked site. The reasoning is pretty simple. Highly ranked sites are considered more reputable and trustworthy. Most of the time, a highly ranked site wouldn’t like to a site that didn’t have good content. Thus, a link from one of those sites means they’re basically vouching for your site and the search engines take the recommendation seriously.
Another thing to look for when exchanging links is framed pages. Due to the way that the search engine spiders work, links that are in frames are completely invisible to them. As such, if an affiliate site is going to link to your site from a frame, the only extra traffic will be from that site alone. Since the more important purpose of link building is to improve your search engine rankings, this should be avoided at all costs. The situation is similar with links from Javascript or Flash pages – spiders can’t read them. Make sure that you’re getting text links, or it’s not worth getting the links at all.
How to Build Links for Traffic not SEO
by Tony Sanderson on Jul.18, 2008, under Link Building
Sometimes niches don’t rely on search engine traffic, but rather links from other sites. This is a great way to start a site, and make money right off the bat. Although these methods involve mostly “nofollow” links, and thus are looked down upon by most SEO marketers, they are a good way to get a constant flow of traffic to your site, and if your ads are right, a small flow of money.
For excellent targeted traffic, I suggest Yahoo Answer. These work especially well with blogs, but other sites can be effectively advertised as well. The key is to first answer the question, so that people don’t just skip over a spammy looking ad. After the answer, put your link either in the source or the answer. These answers can take less than 20 seconds each to read, write, and complete, and as long as you include a good phrase like “If you need any more help check out my site: …” or “blahblahblah.com can probably help you with that problem” people will see the comments as legitimate and most of the time click to investigate. The best types of ads are those that don’t look like ads, and this marketing proves that point.
Another great way to advertise to gain traffic is in Facebook groups. Everyone has a Facebook these days and its really easy to just do a search for your niche, join a bunch of groups and post a comment on each group’s wall. Keep it short but not ad-like and people will click, because they are interested in the topic.
As was previously mentioned; these methods will not help you gain PR or count for anything search engine concerned. But they are an excellent way of getting people to your site, and keep them coming back if you have good content. Just remember you don’t get money for being the first on Google; you get money from people coming to your site, and this type of link building does just that.
Free Link Building Part 2
by Tony Sanderson on Jul.18, 2008, under Link Building
Posting on Blogs and submitting to directories are just some of the ways to build great links to your site. To get links that people may actually click on because they want to go to your site, a link exchange with another site is a great asset. Whether it’s from a site that you own, or someone else’s in a similar or the same niche, link exchange won’t get you a huge number of links usually, but they are often very good ones. Often times, blogs may exchange links in return for a guest post.
When these few links are not enough putting a link in your signature on a forum is an excellent way to build hundreds of new links. May web masters are on forums anyway for fun, or to give and receive information, so posting hundreds or even thousands of times usually isn’t really a chore and is an excellent way to get a large buildup of links, “dofollow” or not.
One final link building tip that I will suggest is to make people want to link to people. A site with no content or reason for existence has a very limited shelf life: people will go to it with good SEO techniques and it might make $1 a day which is fine if you have 100 or so sites, but to make real money with a single site you must have content. With good content your site will be marketed for you and link building won’t be as necessary; people will link to your site from all over the internet. So remember: if you have good content and some saviness you can be successful without spending a dime on paid links. It just takes time.